Matt Costa: Wandering through a world of musical discovery

Matt Costa’s copy of Moby Dick sits on a table, underneath a notebook full of song notes and ideas, before his February 25 show at The University of Notre Dame’s on campus nightclub, Legends.

The story of the wandering outcast sailor Ishmael, searching for his white whale, might be the perfect metaphor for Costa, constantly on the lookout for elusive and pure sounds to incorporate into his music.

But that is a pretty heavy metaphor for a guy who seems to mainly hang out and play his instruments. On a college campus, metaphors seem much more significant than they probably are.

Even if the metaphor is exaggerated, it raises interesting point about Costa’s music, and indie music in general. Sans a major label, artists are free to take up a quest of musical discovery.

In some cases this freedom leads to the indie reputation for being broody, disillusioned and down on the world. Artists like Costa give it a positive outlook, a breath of fresh air for the genre.

The California-based singer songwriter has been steadily building his reputation since recording and releasing a self-titled EP in 2003.

The way he sees it, “instead of being a victim, it’s better to send out a message of camaraderie. A lot of times I’d kind of have a feeling that I needed to overcome, and the song could be that...Sometimes it’s a bigger issue, and sometimes it’s a smaller issue, but it’s just confronting the realities that you have in your day to day life. Sometimes you have to be lifted out of that.”

Costa’s videos capture the whimsy of this exploration, and he is usually shown alone with only a guitar. Specifically, in “Mr. Pitiful,” he is a one man band wandering the town à la Dick Van Dyke in “Mary Poppins”.

While we talk Costa mentions messing around with bossa nova (a type of Brazilian music) and going to the symphony by his house during the past year. That was part of gearing up for his new album, which he is recording in a month.

He even pulls out a new instrumental trick to show me- the bones, which he picked up while touring in Nova Scotia.

Breaking the "Indie Outcast" mold

Costa is not alone in throwing over the moody and self obsessed ideas that go with the indie outcast. Another instance of this vantage change is Fleet Foxes’ latest album and title song “Helplessness Blues” which preaches, “What good is it to sing helplessness blues?”

Even when the lyrics are serious, many bands are pairing them with an upbeat tune, ala Foster the People’s hit “Pumped Up Kicks," in which a catchy tune masks lyrics about gun violence.

Costa’s goal is for people who listen to his music to “dig deep into the past and things and find out a little bit about that music. Just anything outside of their current generation. There’s all lessons in there you can find human similarities that maybe you don’t think about until you listen to that song.”

The very nature of indie music is that it’s independent, outside of society. For Costa and other artists working within the indie community, it’s a chance for expansion.

“It’s all up to the individual to put across whatever it is that happens when they make music, and they feel it,” Costa says. “As humans you’ve got to classify everything– you’ve gotta be born and they’ll give you a name. It’s more a place to start, and then you can work out from there.”

For Costa, music all comes down the exploration, not just for him, but for his fans.

“The older I get the more that I realize that when you put those records on, it’s a documentation of a time and a certain person’s time and heart and effort....That’s kind of what my goal is, to steer people to some of those folks, just like a link in the chain. I write songs, and sometimes that stuff pokes out in different places, and that’s the goal.”

Despite being one of the artists many critics cite as leading a genre out the doldrums and into a place that invites musical adventurers (call him Ishmael?) his aspirations are simple enough.

“Ultimately my main goal as a musician is just to be really good as an old man and play for my kids or my grandkids, and show them all the tricks that I learned.”

Courtney Eckerle is a Spring 2012 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.

This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.